In reality open source is very difficult to build a business around, which means that software can’t exist long term. It’s not about not wanting to be open source, it’s about realising that you and your employees livelihoods are being abused by people who see open source and take it to mean they shouldn’t pay. Especially egregious when your competitors take your work and build a closed sourced business around it.
Abused doesn't make sense, open source means I made this thing and I'm giving it away because I think other people might find it useful. Take this and build something proprietary around is one of the stated goals of OSS, no one is upset AWS is offering hosted Linux.
Nobody will touch your product if it's not OSS doesn't mean you should call it OSS and then rug pull. Build it proprietary from the beginning you cowards. The people who do this are the same as the corporate shills who infiltrate subcultures to monetize them and ultimately destroy the community in the process. If you don't actually share the values of the community you're trying to join, then don't join it.
This little SV "growth hack" where the success of your OSS project is the proving ground to get funding has to die. It's turning a high-trust community into a low-trust one.
It makes sense to anyone who has tried to build open source software as a sustainable business.
It doesn’t make sense to people who contribute small hobby projects or work as researchers / are government funded, which means ultimately paid for by businesses and consumers thereof.
Then don't? This isn't that hard. Microsoft has been saying you can't build a business around OSS since its inception. And they're right. As evidenced by every OSS software business having to drop the OSS.
OSS in business works well when you make your money on something other than the software. Because you're giving it way in it's entirety. Facebook with React, Google with k8s, Twitter with Redis. Once you need the software itself to generate revenue it all falls apart.
How many businesses whose core competency is writing software realizing that there's no 1st party advantage to hosting and AWS is better than you at it will it take for those businesses to not literally give away the only asset the company has with any value?
Where it exists in a small community of other developers, most of whom have a similar mindset, it works fine.
And for very popular projects, there’s enough users for whom it makes economic sense to have some devs on staff to support their usage, tailor stuff, and keep it moving forward to maintain the project.
But in the middle, where most things are, it kinda doesn’t work.
